The phone crickled audibly with scrambler protocols and then a voice. Rovayo cut across it.
“Alicia Rovayo, Special Cases. Print me, and then get me the Alcatraz duty officer.”
Pause. Very deliberately, Carl turned his back on the boy in the chair. Casually, he asked, “Is that going to be satellite-enforceable?”
Rovayo nodded. “There’s bound to be something overhead. One of ours, or something we can rent the time on. Special Cases can usually. Hello? Yeah, this is Rovayo, listen—”
“Hey! No!”
Carl didn’t really need the anonymous yell. Tanindo, as taught by Sutherland, worked up a high level of proximity sense, and the mesh tuned it tighter still. He felt the boy come out of the chair without needing to turn and see it. He turned anyway, at a leisurely rate, and caught the escape bid with a peripheral glimpse, the same peeled awareness that had saved him from the machete attack in the first place. The boy was already out of tackle range, heading for the refuge of a side access walkway. Pumping limbs, head thrown back, a spurt of desperate speed. Not bad, all things considered.
He saw Rovayo stiffen, stop speaking to Alcatraz. Reach for her stowed gun. He put out an arm to forestall her, shook his head.
“Let him go. I’m on it.”
“But you—”
“Relax. Running after idiots is what I do for a living.”
He turned away. Would have liked the gun, but it wasn’t like there was the time to talk it through—
“He’s getting away,” shouted the Australian woman.
Carl spared her a murderous look, then he was in motion. Slow run building to a sprint, gathering speed and purpose, the fine focal intensity of the hunt.
Time to find Merrin and shut him down.
CHAPTER 38
Wide awake, jet-lagged to pieces even the syn didn’t seem able to fix, she sat in the window of the hotel room and stared out over the bay. COLIN privileges—top-floor suite, unobstructed views. The marching lights of the Bay Bridge led her gaze inexorably across to where Oakland’s own nighttime display glowed from the waterline and twinkled up into the hills.
Cheap fucking piece of shit.
Norton wanted to put out a citywide search and detain, but neither she nor Coyle was interested. They both knew damn well where Marsalis was, and the fact that he was technically absent without authorization was the least of it. Rovayo wasn’t answering her phone, and what that meant was punched onto the other Rim cop’s face like bruising from a street fight. Sevgi couldn’t be sure if Coyle and Rovayo had ever been an item as such, but they were partners and most of the time that ran deeper. Higher loyalty stakes—the people you accepted into your bed weren’t likely to have to save your life on any given day. Back with NYPD, Sevgi’d had her share of ill-advised co-worker liaisons, but she never, never crossed that particular line with anybody she partnered, not because she hadn’t occasionally been tempted, but because it would have been stupid. Like taking one of harbor patrol’s big powerboats into the shallow waters off some white sand tourist beach. You just knew that you were going stick and tip.
Not like now, huh, Sev, the syn sneered at her. This one, you’ve got well under control, don’t you? Deep water and an even keel all the way.
Oh shut up.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there, disconnected into the sprinkle-lit night, when someone started hammering on the door.
“Sevgi?”
She blinked. It was Norton’s voice, muffled through the soundproofing on the door, and slightly slurred. They’d sat up in the hotel bar for a while earlier, barely touched drinks and not much to say. At least she’d thought the drinks were barely touched until, out of nowhere, he said to her quietly, Just like cocaine, right. No evolved defenses, too much strain on your heart. She stared back at him, aware that he’d nailed her somehow but unable to make exact rational sense of the words. I don’t know what you’re thinking about, Tom, she answered stiffly. But I’m sitting here thinking about Helena Larsen and how we still haven’t caught the motherfucker who murdered her. It was only halfway to a lie. The promises she’d made to herself and the mutilated corpse back in June weighed heavily whenever she gave them headroom.
So she’d fled the bar, left Norton sitting there with a brief good night. Now it seemed he’d stayed for the long haul.
“Sev. You in there?”
She sighed and levered herself off the window shelf to the floor. Padded across to the door and opened it. Norton leaned on the door frame with one raised arm, not as drunk as she’d feared.
“Yeah, I’m in here,” she said. “What’s going on?”
He grinned. “This you are going to love. Coyle just called.”
“Yeah?” She turned away, left the door open. “Come on in. So what happened? He storm over to Rovayo’s place and drag Marsalis out of her bed?”
“No, not quite.” Norton followed her in, waited until she turned back to face him. He was still grinning. She folded her arms.
“So?”
“So Rovayo and Marsalis stormed Bulgakov’s Cat this evening, bullied their way into Daskeen Azul’s offices, and made a mess. Someone took exception and came at Marsalis with a machete.”
“What?”
“That’s right. Now Rovayo’s called a RimSec lockdown on the whole raft, and Marsalis is somewhere down in the belly of the beast, chasing the machete artist because he thinks it’s all part of some grand conspiracy that’ll lead him to Merrin.”
“Oh you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“I wish I were.”
“Well—where’s Coyle?”
“On his way here, now. He’s heading out to the party with a detachment of RimSec’s public order thugs in tow. I sort of insisted he stop by and pick us up.”
Sevgi grabbed her jacket off the bed and shouldered her way into it.
“Would have settled for him just fucking her,” she muttered, then suddenly remembered she was no longer alone.
Norton pretended not to hear.
In the bowels of Bulgakov’s Cat, Carl found a curious relief. There were at least no fucking stores down here.
His short-term memory spilled recall of endless smooth-floored covered thoroughfares and changing frontages in such volume that their individuality finally blurred into perceptible patterns of appeal. Clothing under glass, museum exhibit sober or in shout-out garish display, depending on the prey it was designed to hook. Little chunks and slices of hardware under soft gleaming lights. Food and drink laid out in holo-real impressionistic tumbles of plenty designed to imitate some ghost memory of a street market. Psychochemicals blown up in holodisplay to sizes where pills and the molecules they were made of each started to resemble the fetishized pieces in the hardware shops. Services and intangibles sold with broad cinematic images that offered almost no intelligible connection with the product. Level after level after level of it, walkway after walkway, maze of corridors, of elevators and staircases, all bright and endless.
He tuned it out and chased the machete boy, as close as the sparse nighttime crowds would allow.
He’d long ago learned that when the untrained are chased, they look back a lot in the early stages of the pursuit, but rapidly gain confidence if no pursuer is readily apparent. He supposed it was evolved tendency—if the big predator doesn’t get you in the first few minutes, you’re probably clear. In any event, the trick was to hang back and let your quarry build up that confidence, then tighten up and follow until they take you where you want to go. It rarely failed.
Of course, he would have liked more cover. The late shoppers were a thin crowd and to make matters worse a typical Rim mix, which meant black or white faces were a lot less common than Asian or Hispanic. And the boy with the machete seemed curiously fixated on Carl’s skin color. That might just have been standard, antiquated race hate—the boy was after all from Jesusland and spouting religious gibberish to match, so anything was possible—but even if it wasn’t, machete boy would be looking back for a black face, and there weren’t that many in the crowd. Carl needed him to see a few, suffer the jolt-drop of terror and then the relief as he wrote the sighting off. The more times that happened, the more the boy’s adrenal response to a black face was going to decay, and the more he’d relax.